Usage of 川普 in Mainland China

[Dlezcano]

Knowing that 特朗普 is the most widely used transcription for "Trump" in Mainland China, I also have seen 川普 in some forums like Zhihu and news sites like Tencent or Netease. Since I do not live there anymore, I would know how often the latter is used and by whom. As far as I can recall, this phenomena also happened with other words like "Titanic", but I am a little surprised about this case since Donald Trump appears everyday on the news.

[889]

I think that colloquially it's usually 川普, so you'll more likely find that in informal text. Xinhua will probably follow some stylebook that says use 特朗普.

[Tomsima]

川普 is used in Taiwan style I believe, whereas 特朗普 is the official transcription for mainland media. Back when Trump had just got in I remember there was a bit of a question mark over what was accepted - at that time 川普 was being used all over social media, as it sounds like a joke name (川普 being a slang word for putonghua spoken with a Sichuan accent...which is also funny to some in its own right). Later it seems xinhua did set out to standardise an 'appropriate' official transcription that could be used in newspapers, and 特朗普 was settled on. This appears not to have happened in Chinese diaspora communities, and thus the 川普 nickname stuck.

 

I'm going off memory here, so maybe there's something I missed about why it became the way it is today

[Takeshi]

In Cantonese there's even a more hilarious nickname for him: 侵侵

 

Wikipedia Cantonese has this down as his actual name, as "當勞侵", but umm, it's wikipedia, so the people who wrote that may have been having fun with themselves.